Free The Juliet Stories by Carrie Snyder

mother’s looking for you. Time to go home.” Bram materializes out of blackness and looks down at Juliet. He takes Emmanuel, who won’t let go of Charlotte’s hair. The three of them are stuck together as if tied with rope. Bram and Charlotte laugh.
    “Let me keep him,” says Charlotte. “He’ll be mine.”
    Juliet can hear her mother through an open window. She does not sound like a woman who is looking for her children. She is playing and singing, and she would play and sing until dawn, given an audience.
    Inside, Keith guzzles a glass of milk by the kitchen door, watched by the cook, who pets his black hair. Marta beckons Juliet into the kitchen: she has a puppy, almost newborn, and she lets Juliet press it, trembling and frightened, against her heart, tiny black nose cold under her chin, teeth like needles in her skin.
    The pieces of the night fall where they may. If a child is clever, loose in a forest of grown-ups, she won’t draw attention to herself. She will be forgotten, which is not the same thing as being neglected. It’s like going invisible, by choice, like hiding in the underbrush to spy, to explore, to play — untroubled.
    “Do we have to go to school?”
    “Yes, or you can never stay up that late again. Ever.”
    “I hate school.”
    “You don’t.”
    “I do.”
    “Where are those green barrettes? Your hair is a mess.”
    “I don’t care.”
    “Juliet!”
    “What? I don’t, and it’s my hair. Why should you care?”
    “I have to care. It’s my job. I’m your mother.”
    “That’s stupid.”
    “It is. How about that: I don’t care either. My head is splitting and Emmanuel was up nursing half the night and your father’s leaving tomorrow for the campo with the delegation and I really and truly don’t care about your hair. How about that.”
    Oh.
    There is something worse to be found, in handwriting, in the office. Here is Juliet, reading about — words, words — torture. She cannot take it in. Forced to swallow his own tongue, cut out of his own head . And worse. The children are watching, the fields are on fire, the animals are screaming from a shed where they have been shut up and set alight, and the bayonet digs into the mother’s belly and pulls out a baby. Tossed to the dogs. The children are watching. The children are forced at gunpoint to watch.
    She cannot take it in, but she cannot take it out.
    Strange, she can’t guess how the pictures will flicker silently inside, against, and around her, always, nor how she will hold them in her hands — not the way a memory is held of an individual loved and lost, but held lightly between the fingers like playing cards from a deck, dealt for an unknown game.
    She can’t love the people in the pictures; she does not know them. She can hate and fear the men with their bayonets. She can pity the tortured. But she cannot love. It is too painful to throw love like a rescue line to humans doomed to suffer, already dead and gone. She will remember forever, and yet never well enough, never with the particularity of love: these people whom her parents have come to save from suffering, who continue to be killed, whose killing will not end the suffering of others, whose torture and murder fall like drops of rain and vanish in the punishing sun.
    Words. They scrape along her skin, enter, and the wound heals instantly. She appears unhurt. She does not suffer nightmares or wake in a cold sweat or fear for her life, because she does not believe it could happen to her.
    That keeps her safe: belief that she is different, her family unique, marked out for protection by their skin colour and their citizenship and, yes, by their goodness, their rightness. So much of what she believes is wrong, but if it is never proven to be wrong, how will she ever know?
    She hears her mother and Charlotte on the porch, talking, in disagreement, and she smoothes the loose sheet of paper, its story, its murdered and tortured, face down on the